Starting a business is hard. Recently, my dad has been talking about starting a small business as a side project to his day job. He's always been an miracle wood worker. In a way, he's much like me - a hacker (for those of you that don't know, in the programming world we call ourselves hackers). My dad has built countless pieces of furniture and holds the mindset, "We saw this in a country living magazine, I can build that." My parents' house is almost fully furnished by my dad.
He wants to make a business out of selling his furniture, but he's allowing his lizard brain to prevent him from doing so. For many people thinking about starting a yoga studio, I'm sure the lizard brain has got them, too. You keep telling yourself you want to open a yoga studio, but there's something that holds you back. There is so much information out there. It's easy to fall into the trap of reading it all. We want to help. We want to share with you the amazing things that can happen if you get started.

There is so much information out there. It's easy to fall into the trap of reading it all.

If you've thought about starting a yoga studio, you've probably searched Google for "start a yoga business" or some other variation. This is probably a good start if you've never started your own business before. You may also find yourself overwhelmed. For example, I performed the search myself and started down the rabbit hole of learning about yoga certification, picking a type of yoga, and the formal process of Bikram yoga.

Don't get me wrong. There's a wealth of information available for one dreaming about starting a yoga studio. We were able to find a few resources we felt really hit the nail on the head.

Once again, Mind Body Green comes through with a great article from Karen Fabian with 14 tips for starting your own yoga business. Karen talks about the importance of a business dashboard and saving for your taxes. These concepts may be new to many people starting a business and also many people who have been running a business to years. Business dashboards can serve great purpose providing you insights into the health of your business.

At Tula, we challenge you to use our reports to gain insights into what classes are most popular and where your recurring revenue is coming from. Personally, I would disagree with focusing on your break-even revenue during your first 3 months of being open, but that's just me. I would argue you should give yourself at least 6 months of runway before you reach your break-even revenue.

Much like Karen talk about the importance of a business dashboard, Teachasana reiterates the importance of keeping track of your class attendance. There are countless ways to do that. Surprisingly, three popular ways to do this include pencil and paper, Evernote, and Google Docs. At Tula, we've spoken to many people running their own yoga studio with note cards for many years. When you're looking to start a yoga studio, you don't need to know everything. If you develop a system that works for you, you're on the right track.

To solve the class attendance problem at Tula, we give you a simple check-in page. As you check-in students, you can record purchases if they don't have enough class credit. All of this ties into insightful reports about class attendance and revenue.

Starting a business is hard. There's no doubt about it. If you think you can become an expert before starting your first yoga studio, you're probably wrong. There's a saying in the business world, "Jump off the cliff, and build your parachute on the way down." When you start a yoga studio, you'll learn something new every day. There's no sense trying to learn it all before you jump off the cliff.

Good luck!

Thinking about starting a yoga studio? Have a yoga studio but aren't using any software yet? At Tula Software, we have many customers just like you. With Tula, you can store credit cards, set people up on monthly memberships, embed a class calendar into your own website, use text messaging to schedule subs, keep track of student credits and attendances, collect payments online, and a whole lot more.